Marat ~ Sade

Marat ~ Sade is the abbreviated title of one of the crowning works of 20th-century European theatre. For a few weeks, the Sala Fernando Arrabal of the Naves del Teatro Español will become a huge mental health centre where a group of patients/actors act out scenes set in a time following the French Revolution.

This play within a play, directed by and starring the Marquis de Sade, is the setting for a philosophical debate between Sade himself and the historical revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. Over the course the story, we sense great tension between various questions: vice versus virtue, the collective versus the individual, rich versus poor... Do we sacrifice everything for pleasure in life? Or do we gain everything through the sacrifice of death?

We find ourselves before a poetically-charged play about the power of the collective as opposed to nihilist thought. There is no avoiding how this text by Peter Weiss draws on Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, but is also inspired by Grotowski's Poor Theatre, with the clear influence of Bertolt Brecht.

This new production, by Teatro Español, has a great team of creators and actors, which, in addition to the vision of Israeli choreographer Sharon Fridman, will add a certain amount of poetic distortion to a text that is unquestionably formidable and completely contemporary..
Luis Luque